Escape from Indianapolis

Going All the Way in search of freedom during the Great Repression

The '70s were so awash in '50s nostalgia that it's surprising Dan Wakefield's 1970 bestseller Going All the Way is only now turning up in big-screen form. Of course, not all '50s coming-of-age stories are the same: Unlike The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti--which pretty much dominated the genre in the early '70s--Going All the Way is set squarely (and I do mean squarely) in classic middle America. Wakefield's Midwest is a Norman Rockwell town--the sort of place that artists like Hemingway and Fitzgerald come from, but never move to.

The film starts in 1954, one of the all-time low points of American culture--a horribly repressed moment when McCarthyism was at its height and rock and roll hadn't quite yet broken into white, middle-class consciousness. Twentyish photographer Sonny Burns (Jeremy Davies) returns home to Indianapolis at the end of the Korean War. Sonny is all mumbles and social awkwardness, the sort of apparent nonentity who has already disappeared from the memories of his high school classmates.

On the train home, Sonny bumps into high school football hero Gunner Casselman (Ben Affleck), a handsome stud of whom Sonny was in awe in high school. To Sonny's surprise (and ours), Gunner remembers him, in part, of course, because Sonny once took a particularly legend-boosting shot of him for the school paper.

Sonny is even more flabbergasted when Gunner goes out of his way to strike up a friendship. The experience of war seems to have knocked Gunner off the predictable, middle-class track he followed in school. An incipient bohemian, he now sees the value in a high school outcast like Sonny.

The war has had its impact on Sonny as well. His homecoming is grotesque. (It's shot in almost the same distorted way as the hilarious scuba scene in The Graduate.) His parents (Jill Clayburgh and John Lordan) are a parody--well, maybe not a parody--of God-fearing, conservative True Americans; they expect him to settle down into a dull job and marry his high school sweetie (Amy Locane). To Sonny, Gunner's sexy, "sophisticated" mother (Lesley Ann Warren) is clearly a more exotic sexual possibility--until, at least, Gunner turns him on to the even more exotic prospect of...gasp!...Jewish girls.

To the dismay of Sonny's parents, the two young men become best friends, cruising for chicks, double-dating, and wondering what to do with their lives and why. Worst of all, they are clearly not going to stick with the lives they were programmed for. Like veterans of the World Wars before them, they have seen too much to pretend placidly that Indianapolis is all the world has to offer. Less than a thousand miles away is New York City--a wonderland filled with artists and writers. Even less realistic, Sonny's parents see the Big Apple as the center of modern perdition.

Fresh out of the world of MTV promos and music videos, director Mark Pellington, working from Wakefield's own screenplay, wisely avoids the excesses of MTV flash. It would have been glaringly inappropriate and anachronistic. There are occasional surreal moments: Most successful is a scene that perfectly reproduces the giddy exhilaration of a first-time drunk. He gives us an engaging look at '50s mid-America--concentrating on the sexual hypocrisies that, by the story's end, are about to give birth to a rarely chronicled generation of cultural rebels who thrived between the late Beat period and before the emergence of the '60s counterculture.

Sonny and Gunner are midwestern cousins to Sonny and Duane, the Texan heroes of The Last Picture Show. But, on film, their story never achieves quite the same level of depth or complexity; Going All the Way is somewhere in between the Bogdanovich classic and American Graffiti on the realism scale. This is the best work to date I've seen from director of photography Bobby Bukowski; he and production designer Therese Deprez don't miss a trick in recreating the look and feel of the period. (Contrary to what you might think from other films about the '50s, the world was in color back then.)

Davies is very effective as an even bigger screw-up than he played in Spanking the Monkey; he looks like a younger Buck Henry or Orson Bean, but his clumsy, fumbling physical gestures are a cross between Stan Laurel and Jake Johansen. Affleck reveals a hunky, leading-man quality that was not apparent in Chasing Amy; and Warren is, as always, sexy and funny, in a too-small role.